Pieces
by divinecomedienne
Summary: Claire leaves the Dollhouse for the second time and sets about tracking down the pieces she was made from.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This story follows on from Claire 2.0 (which in turn follows Safe) but you don't have to read that one to understand it.

* * *

When Claire left the Dollhouse for the second time she packed light: a small suitcase containing a few clothes, a bag of toiletries and a security camera tape, and a laptop stolen from the equipment store onto which she had transferred two files. Both the files came from Topher's home directory: she'd snuck back into his office after he thought she'd gone and hacked his PC, the security of which he apparently hadn't bothered to upgrade since she broke in the first time. He probably would have just given them to her if she'd asked but she didn't want to give him another chance to try and talk her out of leaving or ask any awkward questions about her plans.

The first of the two files Claire knew she would never open; it was the dossier holding the details of her body's original owner. Why she felt the need to take a copy away with her she couldn't quite say, but Claire never had been one to try and forget the things that troubled her and those few thousand kilobytes of data stood as a kind of neat shorthand for a messy emotional tangle of guilt and resentment.

The second file was much larger and more complicated. Claire opened it the same night she left in a motel on the outskirts of San Diego and stayed up perusing its contents until long after dawn. As she read, she made a few jottings on the motel notepaper; names and addresses mainly, with occasional circled words alongside them: 'summer camp,' 'Med school,' 'dated Sean,' 'agoraphobia?' At the end of the list were two names without addresses: 'Dr Michael Saunders' (the only man) was crossed through and 'WHISKEY' in bold capitals was followed by 'SCARS.'

The next day, she bought a map of the country and set about plotting the most efficient route around all the addresses on her list. She was in no particular hurry but it was in her nature to plan everything she did carefully before she started. It seemed she had a physiotherapist from Minnesota to thank for that.

Her tactics were cautious at first; she didn't like the thought of her subjects seeing her, even in passing, so she would simply park outside each woman's house or apartment block and wait patiently for her to emerge. This strategy had a serious flaw, of course, in that Topher's file contained no photographs; why would it? So if her target lived in a large building, or one with several female inhabitants of roughly the right age, and she couldn't find a picture on the internet, Claire would be forced to approach neighbors with elaborate cover stories about tracking down long-lost friends in order to get a physical description. Her reward, the privilege of scrutinizing the mundane daily routines of a succession of perfect strangers: mostly middle-class women around her own age; mostly doctors of various kinds with the occasional social worker or teacher thrown in. Claire stared at them through her windshield as they came and went with their shopping and their briefcases and their babies and tried earnestly to feel some sense of affinity with each one, but none ever came.

Eventually, feeling both frustrated and sufficiently confident that neither she nor any of her subjects were at risk of being struck by a disturbing sense of similarity, she began to accost them. Small pretexts to begin with: she would stop them in the street to ask the time or ring their doorbells to enquire about a missing cat. Gradually, she grew bolder; initiated ransom conversations about the weather, or the price of parking; then later, more ambitious ones based on the fragments of history or personality she knew they shared:

"Sorry to bother you but I can't resist asking: did you ever spend a summer at Camp Farwell in Vermont in around 1985 or six? … You did? Oh my god, so it was you! You see, I used to go every year and I have a vivid memory of a little girl with curly blonde hair and green eyes who was really gifted at the violin…"

"Would you mind if I shared your table? I know there's a free one over there but it's next to that guy with the Doberman and I have to admit I'm terrified of dogs; pathetic I know… Really? You too? That makes me feel better. But I bet that you, unlike me, could cope with something small like a Chihuahua, right?"

"Oh hello, is that Doctor Howard? My name is Claire Saunders, I'm a GP down in LA but I've done a bit of research into psychiatry out of personal interest and I found the article you published in the APA journal a couple of years ago about Borderline Personality Disorder really fascinating. As I'll be in Portland for a conference next week I was wondering if you'd have time to let me buy you a coffee and pester you with a few questions."

Hours and hours of talking to strangers; befriending them, coaxing them to recite her own life story, opinions, deepest fears and desires back to her, piece by tiny piece. It was painstaking work and it went against Claire's natural instinct (or, more precisely, that of Dr Julia Kirilova, MCSP) to avoid any kind of social interaction with people she didn't know extremely well.

Of course, the grand irony here was that Claire _did_ know the people on her list - or at least very specific parts of each of them - better than anyone else could ever hope to; perfectly even. She knew this objectively, but somehow, when she actually met them face-to-face she never really_ felt_ it. None of them ever seemed like anything more than what she pretended they were: random women who happened to have been to the same camp or college as her, or who had the same phobia, or had once dated the same guy. In fact, Claire gradually came to realize that these encounters were having the opposite effect to the one she had hoped for when she set out (though when she thought about it now, she felt stupid for ever believing there could be any other outcome). Her memories were becoming _less_ real; they belonged to other, totally separate people; fitted into the fabric of their lives and personalities in an organic, seamless way that no one, not even a genius, could ever artificially recreate.

So, she changed her strategy; put away her list of addresses and turned her attention inward to her own memories. She started with the places: the schools, universities, apartments, parks, beaches and bars where the most significant moments of her life were supposed to have happened. Visiting them was certainly less arduous than the endless conversations, but it was still a strange and ultimately unsatisfying experience. As a scientist, Claire found it interesting to methodically compare each place with her recollections of it; checking off each tiny detail against a mental catalog and marveling a little bit, in spite of herself, every time there was a match. But the sensation the places themselves aroused in her was harder to pin down; she knew she wasn't really qualified to judge as she didn't have anything real to compare it with, but she didn't think you could call it nostalgia. It was hazier than that; closer to déjà vu in the way it felt, but in truth its exact opposite: her subconscious telling her that she _hadn't _been somewhere before, while her logical mind insisted that she had.

Finally, after she'd exhausted every last coffee shop, library and Laundromat that could possibly be construed as having some minor personal significance, Claire steeled herself for what she feared would be the most emotionally grueling part of her mission yet: tracking down the people to whom she believed she had been close. Obviously, she reflected bitterly, Topher, smart guy that he was, had made sure that there weren't many of them; and none at all who'd remained close enough for her to expect them to get in touch. Her parents (or rather the parents of Alexa Hartley) had been killed in a plane crash when she was in college, thus conveniently endowing her with a chronic fear of flying (nice work there, Dr Brink). She was an only child and had no living family she knew of apart from an elderly great aunt who lived in Zimbabwe. Her group of friends had never been large either and their number had dwindled steadily as she got older, mainly due to the increasing intensity of her assortment of phobias, which eventually prevented her from attending any kind of social occasion and, on her bad days, even from leaving the house. (It all fitted together very neatly when you thought about it; what socially normal person would take a job at the Dollhouse?). Nevertheless, there were still five or six ex-classmates and colleagues that she remembered fondly, even though they'd all given up calling her a long time ago.

Then there were the ex-boyfriends. Only three of them really, if you didn't count the couple of guys she'd dated casually in high school and her one, very uncharacteristic, holiday fling: a Mexican called Jorge who hadn't returned her emails. Needless to say, the three count-worthy relationships had all ended badly and she didn't keep in contact with any of her exes. She did actually have contact details for them, neatly listed in her Outlook address book along with those of many of her other old friends (Topher's attention to detail was impressive; though she'd bet it had been poor old Ivy who had to type them out). But they were all fake, of course; it was so obvious they would be she could hardly even be bothered to check. It didn't matter anyway. It was never difficult to find people who didn't mind being found, especially with computer skills like Claire's. Far more daunting was the prospect of walking up to a person who had once been so important to her and seeing nothing but blank unrecognition in their oh-so-familiar eyes. But it had to be done, because even if _they_ didn't know it, these were people with whom she had once shared some kind of bond; felt a connection. And if she could only recreate that connection with just one of them, even if only briefly, then she would know that there was some part of herself and her experience that was real and authentic and not just a collection of random snippets of other people's lives.

So, Claire made her greatest effort yet, putting all her insider knowledge about each target to work to try and insinuate herself into their affections as quickly as possible; to accelerate through their relationship in a matter of days to a point which would normally take months of rooming, or working or sleeping together to attain. Her most usual tactic was to pass herself off as a distant cousin of the person whose memory the relationship came from: she was new in town; she didn't know anyone here and so her cousin had given her her old friend Hannah-stroke-Martin-stroke-Sunita's contact details, assuring her that they would 'look after her.' And it worked, they looked after her: let her stay at their apartments, accepted her into their social circles, took her out with them, in one case (confusingly, an old friend rather than an ex-boyfriend) even tried to come on to her; and, to Claire's surprise, for the most part, it wasn't an unpleasant experience. The overpowering irrational resentment she expected to feel toward them for not remembering her never materialized. In fact, she found that she didn't even resent them for the things they _could_ reasonably be blamed for, like falling out of touch with her memory's original owner; or, in the case of the ex-boyfriends, a variety of other misdemeanors of varying severity.

But the flip side of the situation, or, more precisely, its cause, Claire reluctantly acknowledged, was that she didn't actually care about any of these supposed friends. Not really; not the way she remembered she had. It wasn't that she didn't like them; on the contrary, they were all, at least superficially, nice enough people, but the sense of deep and genuine connection she hoped so desperately would resurface never did, and Claire became more and more painfully aware that it had never really existed in the first place. Or rather, she corrected herself, the connection _had _existed but it wasn't she who had experienced it. That emotion, just like her memories, her body and almost everything else that made up Claire Saunders, was stolen property. This supposed voyage of self-discovery she'd been conducting for the last three years was, in fact, an investigation into grand larceny. The perpetrators of the crime itself remained unknown: hundreds of faceless Rossum doctors around the country who had committed repeated identity theft in its most extreme and literal form by making scans of their unwitting patients' brains. No, the unlikely criminal mastermind to whom Claire's inquiries inevitably led was not them but the _receiver _of the stolen goods; the man who had made her, Claire, into his unwilling and guilt-ridden accessory: a certain Dr Christopher Brink.

Throughout Claire's long and frustrating personal odyssey, and even before, a subconscious part of her had never stopped obsessing over the question of why, when he was piecing together her imprint, Topher had made the choices he had. Why this character trait, or that talent or the other boyfriend? Sometimes it was obvious: skills and attributes to make her the best and most caring doctor possible or phobias to make her too scared to venture outside the Dollhouse; that sort of thing had probably come down on a list of instructions from Dewitt. Often, though, the motivation was more subtle, less easy to interpret, sometimes to the point where Claire would begin to wonder if it existed at all. After all, as Topher himself had once explained, he was designing a person, not a Roomba: once the essential elements of the personality had been furnished, a lot of extra padding was required to turn the imprint into a fully-rounded human being.

Occasionally, though, hidden amongst the necessities and the random filler, Claire would come across a particular memory or attribute which seemed as if it must have been included for Topher's own, purely personal reasons. One of her strongest suspicions was formed during her encounter with Sean, the least fondly-remembered of the ex-boyfriends. Arrogant, immature and unfaithful to boot, Claire had always considered him the most unconvincing part of her life history – Topher's shoddiest work – because, why would she ever have dreamt of going on a date with a jerk like that, let alone living with him for the best part of a year? (True, there were probably a lot of girls who had asked themselves a similar question at some point in their lives, but other girls' personalities hadn't been designed on a computer).

But then, sitting at Sean's kitchen table, smiling and rolling her eyes while he rattled off a string of his half-funny, half-infuriating, self-aggrandizing anecdotes, it had suddenly hit her: he reminded her of Topher. He even looked a bit similar (though she had to admit, grudgingly, that Topher was the more attractive of the two). He even wore sweater vests; _that _couldn't be a coincidence. It seemed that for all Topher's insistence that he hadn't made Claire hate him, he'd done the next best thing: ensured that the subconscious psychological associations he evoked in her were of angst, conflict and betrayal of trust. Basically, it was a slightly more sophisticated variant on the physical revulsion he'd given her to the scent of his aftershave. And she found it supremely annoying, this subtle, personally-motivated manipulation; it bothered her more than any other aspect of her programming, though logically there was no reason it should.

Another, possibly related, question regarding Topher's personal investment in the design of her imprint was one that had troubled Claire ever since she first discovered she was an Active: the question of whether he had had some kind of prior acquaintance with whoever she used to be, dating from before her arrival at the Dollhouse. Her suspicions had initially been stirred by his apparent eagerness for Claire to discover her original identity (why else would he have given her computer skills advanced enough to allow her to hack his heavily-protected files?) and his tactless assumption that she would want that personality back. The theory had later seemed to be disproved when Topher had disobeyed DeWitt's orders to restore Claire's body to its owner and brought Claire back instead. But now that she was analyzing her imprint in detail, Claire kept coming across tiny, idiosyncratic traits that had no obvious usefulness, yet had been added individually, hence deliberately, to her personality. Her love of 1940s screwball comedies, for example; or her preference for writing in pencil rather than ink; or her habit of clutching anything she was holding protectively to her chest. There was no need or reason for Claire Saunders to have these particular quirks, so she could only conclude that Topher had gone to the trouble of including them because they held some kind of personal sentimental value. Did they represent an attempt to preserve a small portion of her original self? Or were they an homage to some completely other woman he'd once known? Either way, she found the idea both creepy and more than a little sad.

Keen to distract herself from fretting over such matters, Claire decided the time had come to face a task which, at the beginning of her journey, had filled her with dread, but which she now regarded with a dreary _sang froid_: nothing she had encountered thus far had had any kind of profound emotional effect on her, good or bad; why should this? She dug out the long-neglected CCTV tape from the bottom of her suitcase; ordered an expensive player for it from a Japanese website and then, one day when Dorothy, her college lab partner and current hostess, was safely out of town, she settled down in front of the TV to confront the very last person on her original hit list.

Even though she knew pretty much what to expect, it was still a strange experience to watch herself wander around the Dollhouse doing things she had no memory of doing with that unnerving, blank look on her face. Even stranger was seeing a middle-aged man with glasses sitting in her office and doing all the things she _did_ remember doing every single day for six months, right down to giving out her lollipops; it was unsettling. Claire put the tape on fast-forward until she reached the day the Alpha-shaped hell broke loose. Her own recollections of the incident were blurry and confused; that was only realistic given the speed at which the events had taken place, not to mention their traumatic nature. Watching the scene play out from this objective position was still horrific - of course it was - but it was also very different; literally so, in that Claire's memory of it did not have an authentic source: it was part-composite, part-total fabrication. She'd known it must be from the start, since obviously Topher didn't possess a copy of the late Dr Saunders' memories for that fateful day; in fact, Claire had learned from the file she'd stolen that his last routine scan had been more than two weeks earlier. So all of what she remembered of the events leading up to the crisis had to be pure invention; most likely a computer-generated extrapolation based on a mixture of security camera footage and the doctor's usual, eminently predictable routine. Yet it was still jarring to see the proof unrolling before her eyes, especially when she reached the point at which her memories diverged completely from the actions of her grey-haired alter ego on the screen. Apparently the real Dr Saunders had met his grisly end after he valiantly dashed upstairs to investigate the disturbance in the imprinting room. As Claire remembered it, however, she had been attacked much earlier, downstairs in the activity room; a memory which had clearly been taken, on a sensory level at least, directly from Whiskey, the first of Alpha's victims.

It was surely, Claire reflected, some of Topher's finest work: the way he had embedded the Active's simple, genuine feelings of fear and pain as Alpha slashed at her with his pruning shears into the entirely artificial framing structure of Claire Saunders' supposed actions just before and after the attack. When you thought about it (and she had thought about it a lot, for all her determination not to), Topher didn't even really need to have gone to all that trouble; he could have explained her scars in any number of ways unconnected with Alpha's rampage. Maybe he'd wanted to make her extra keen to ensure that an Active would never go so horrifically off the rails again, or maybe he'd just found something poetic in the idea of giving her back a memory which had been formed in her own brain.

Claire had expected that touch of authenticity, the fact that for a few crucial seconds Whiskey's ordeal corresponded exactly with her own, to push watching it happen on the tape from the harrowing to the unbearable. After all, seeing Victor suffer the same fate had been agonizing enough. But actually, it turned out to be strangely comforting, in a perverse and guilt-tinged way, because, even though she had the same body, Whiskey was so clearly _not_ Claire. She was just an uncomprehending Doll who, after Alpha had been pulled away from her, had lain quietly on the floor, dabbing curiously at the blood streaming from her face as handlers and domestic staff swarmed panicking around her. Claire, on the other hand, had scrambled instantly to her feet, pressing the sleeves of her lab coat firmly to her wounds, while she shouted instructions to her medical staff. Topher had allowed her that much dignity, at least.

Once Whiskey and the body of Dr Saunders had been carried away on their respective stretchers, Claire stopped the tape and went into Dorothy's bathroom, where she scrutinized her own face in the mirror. She traced a finger across the fine network of scars and thought about how important to her they'd once been. She owed them her very existence, and the fear had haunted her, from the day she discovered who she really was - or, more importantly, wasn't - that the day they finally faded away would be the day that existence would be confiscated; her body reduced to the beautiful, smiling shell it had been before Alpha desecrated it.

But even before that, before she ever heard of a Doll named Whiskey, Claire had always seen Alpha's attack as a defining moment in her life; the event that retrospectively justified all her innate paranoia and mistrust of the world at large. The scars were a reminder and an excuse to never let down her guard. They shaped the way others saw her too: an object of pity, to be treated kindly and respectfully but also a little fearfully. Until Boyd, no one at the Dollhouse had ever tried to get close to her and she'd told herself she liked it that way: it wasn't appropriate to form emotional bonds with colleagues. The problem was, of course, that she never met anyone else. She'd made a few half-hearted forays onto a dating website but even as she was paying her registration fee, part of her always doubted that it was anything but fantasy to imagine that she'd ever step outside of the Dollhouse walls.

Now, though, everything had changed. She _had_ left the Dollhouse - twice - and she had accepted at last that the scars on her face, like all the psychological hindrances that had once held her back, were not really hers. True, they had been inflicted on the body she now inhabited but they had no more personal significance to Claire Saunders than the scar on her left knee that she'd supposedly acquired in a roller-skating accident at the age of nine.

Claire sighed and left the bathroom. She sat down at Dorothy's computer and looked up Caroline Farrell's email address on the Tucson Technical Institute website. It was doubtful whether Echo still checked the account but it was the best way Claire could think of contacting her without DeWitt finding out about it.

Dear Echo, she wrote,

I'm writing you like this because I need some information from the Dollhouse and I doubt whether DeWitt would be willing to help me. As you probably know, Topher went against her wishes and restored me to my body, rather than the personality of its original owner. DeWitt found out and was furious, of course, but for some reason she didn't order my immediate termination, so I took the opportunity to escape. I hope you won't condemn me for that. I think, out of everyone, you are the most likely to understand.

I've spent the last few years trying to come to terms with what I am and I've finally decided the time has come to get rid of my scars. If you are still at the Dollhouse, I'd appreciate it if you could look up the name and address of the plastic surgeon who treated Victor and pass them on to me. If you could also get hold of the House's account or payment details, that would be even more helpful. I'm sure DeWitt keeps that kind of information under lock and key but you've always been more than a match for her security.

I hope our paths will cross again one day. Until then, look after yourself and any other former Actives who are with you.

Claire

Weeks passed and no answer came. Tired of Dorothy's incessant, well-meaning attempts to get her a social life, Claire moved out of her house and rented a small apartment of her own. Eventually she gave up waiting for a reply from Echo and started researching other plastic surgeons, but their fees were all far beyond what the dwindling remnants of her savings would allow.

It was her longest period of inactivity since she'd left the Dollhouse and she began, for the first time, to pay some attention to the events happening in the world beyond her immediate surroundings. Worrying things were happening: multiple reports of previously completely sane and regular people going on random killing sprees; a kind of epidemic of irreversible amnesia sweeping across the country; countless unexplained disappearances. Claire wondered if she was being paranoid to assume that Rossum, or at least their technology, was somehow behind it all; blaming Topher Brink and his ilk for everything that was wrong with the world as usual.

Then, almost four months after Claire's message to Echo, an email arrived from a Hotmail address belonging to one Eleanor Penn. Claire smiled and opened it.

Hey Doc,

Great to hear from you. Sorry I haven't been the speediest in replying. We've been kind of busy round here 'cause it turned out that trip to Tucson we took just before you left was a fail – Rossum is still alive and kicking; they've got themselves a new leader and it looks like they've got big and nasty new plans – I guess you've seen all the scary shit in the news about people going psycho for no reason. Topher reckons they've rebuilt the mass-wiping and imprinting tech and it's only a matter of time before they start testing it out on a major scale. I've been out of the House a lot recently trying to figure out a way to stop them – probably shouldn't go into the details here.

Anyways, I'm pleased to hear you've taken some time out to get your head together after all that fucked up stuff with Boyd and the sleeper imprint. You deserved it. IMO DeWitt has owed it to you for a long time to get your scars fixed, so I just went and told her that straight out and she didn't argue - I think underneath that cold British exterior, she feels bad about what happened to you. All the info you wanted is in the attachment. I'm heading off on what might turn into a pretty long trip soon and I doubt I'll be contactable so here's wishing you good luck with the surgery, Sister, and whatever else you decide to do with your life.

Stay safe,

Echo


	2. Chapter 2

As Claire left the plastic surgery clinic, scar-free, three weeks later, the end of Echo's email came back to her: "whatever else you decide to do with your life." What else was there for her to do now? Where was there for her to go? She was back in LA, the city where she had spent most of her life (if you only counted the four real years), yet it felt almost completely foreign to her. Apart from the Dollhouse, there was only one place here which held any significance at all; a place she had thought, when she left, that she would never want to see again: Boyd's apartment in Santa Monica. She had stayed there for two brief, blissful months after she finally managed to screw up the courage to leave the Dollhouse for the first time. She remembered how terrified she'd been as she drove out of the parking lot in a stolen convertible, but also full of a wild and reckless determination totally unlike anything she'd ever felt before: fuck Adelle DeWitt and Topher Brink and the choices they'd made for her; she was going to be her own person now and live her own life. When she called Boyd a few days later and announced her decision, he'd told her she was the bravest person he'd ever met and asked if she'd have dinner with him and it was, without a doubt, the happiest moment of any of her lives.

Before the rational part of her mind had time to tell her how much she was bound to regret it, Claire was on the freeway on her way to Santa Monica.

She could feel the tide of memory rising as she turned the corner onto Boyd's street; mounting some more as she walked through the neatly-kept yard in front of the apartment block and punched in the code for the outer door; building and building as she took the elevator up to the third floor and turned her key in the lock of number thirty-one. But the force with which it crashed down on her as she stepped inside the apartment was staggering; stronger than anything she could ever have prepared herself for. She sat down unsteadily on the couch, taking short, panicky breaths as reminiscences beat remorselessly down on her: she and Boyd stowing groceries in the kitchen closet side by side; the two of them watching an entire boxset of Howard Hawks movies in one sitting on a rainy Sunday afternoon; the cake that Boyd baked her to celebrate her first month away from the Dollhouse that was so sticky they had to eat it with spoons straight from the tin. Tiny, insignificant things for the most part, but each one so breathtakingly vivid and _real_, in a way nothing else had felt for a very long time, that she could hardly stand it.

She'd spent three years of her life vainly searching for a place or a person that would be capable of resuscitating her deadened emotions; of reaffirming her ever-weakening sense of who she was and what she'd experienced. Now, suddenly, unexpectedly, months after she'd called off the search, she'd found what she was looking for and it was excruciating. Because those beautiful, authentic, non-programmed memories were, in fact, the phoniest of the lot. Everything Boyd had ever told her about himself and how he felt about her was insincere; even if some of it was true (and she would never stop wondering if any of it had been), it was all ultimately still part of a dense network of deceit and manipulation. He had crafted their whole relationship as carefully as Topher designed his imprints, so that eventually, nervous, eternally-suspicious Claire Saunders would trust him deeply enough to let him put her in the imprinting chair. He'd told her he wanted to make a back -up copy of the woman he loved so that he'd never lose her. Then he'd loaded another personality into her brain, flushing Claire's away when it suited him. And then he'd died, Echo and Topher had killed him before Claire had had a chance to confront him about what he'd done to her.

Unconsciously, she got to her feet and began restlessly roaming from room to room as if hoping to find Boyd's ghost lurking in a corner, ready for interrogation. Whoever DeWitt had sent to search the place must have been careful, as everything seemed almost exactly as they'd left it when they called off their romantic Friday-night dinner all those years ago and dashed to the Dollhouse at DeWitt's urgent request: two half-empty wine glasses on the dining table, the tickets for the concert they were supposed to be going to pinned to the notice-board in the kitchen, Claire's make-up bag lying open next to the bathroom sink. The vestiges of the normal life which she had so fleetingly lived.

The only obvious sign of intruders was in the bedroom, where Boyd's closet was hanging open to reveal a safe embedded in the wall behind. It was empty now but she remembered Topher telling her that this was where the wedge containing the update of her personality – the one he had imprinted her with against DeWitt's orders - had been found. At the time, Topher had, with disarming earnestness, tried to convince Claire that the fact Boyd had made this wedge was evidence that he had intended to bring her back one day and that consequently she must really have meant something to him, in spite of everything. Sometimes, in her less cynical, more lonely moods, Claire was almost capable of believing what Topher had said, but it didn't change anything anyway: Boyd was gone and no one would ever understand the motivation behind any of the strange and devious things he'd done. She stared for a moment at a photo of the two of them, smiling on Venice Beach, which was propped against the lamp on the bedside table. Then, blinking back tears that Boyd didn't deserve, Claire threw the photo in the trashcan, left the apartment and headed for the Dollhouse.

* * *

It was late by the time Claire reached the Dollhouse. She was glad; she felt too fragile to deal with a crowd of people and their questions.

There was a guard as usual in the booth at the entrance to the underground garage and Claire was surprised to see it was the man who had once been the Active named Delta. She wondered if he, like she, had come back to the Dollhouse of his own free will. Delta had been recruited before her time so he didn't recognize her, but fortunately Claire still had her old staff pass and he let her in without any awkward questions about why she'd been away for so long. It could be that a lot of former inhabitants had been returning recently; there were frightening things happening in the outside world, after all, and maybe people sensed that the safest place to be during the hurricane was at its eye.

Up on the main floor, the lights were off but Claire could make out the huddled shapes of ten or fifteen people sleeping on the floor, wrapped in blankets. The image it brought to mind was of a refugee camp and somehow that seemed appropriate; the Dollhouse had always been a refuge for those who had fled, or been evicted, from real life. Yet for Claire, it was the only place that ever _had_ been real; the only place she really belonged. She knew that now, accepted it; just like she accepted that there was only one person to whom she had ever had any real emotional tie. Her relationship with Topher had been fraught and turbulent, and she couldn't, even now, say exactly how she felt about him, but she felt _something _and that was more than she could say about anyone else. She knew she'd been important to him too – the fact he'd chosen to bring her back was proof of that – though she wasn't sure if he saw her primarily as an object of fear, pity or something approaching affection. Lonely as she was, she'd take any of the three.

She picked her way through the sleeping bodies carefully and mounted the stairs to Topher's office. The blinds were drawn but the yellow glow that was visible between them indicated that lights or computers were still on up there. Claire's heart pounded in her ears and her hand shook slightly as she reached the top of the staircase and pushed the door. She knew she was still full of the fury, grief and confusion that her visit to Boyd's apartment had provoked and that, if she were her own doctor, she'd advise herself to go and get a good night's sleep before she confronted another potentially stressful situation. But she didn't feel like a doctor right now, more like a junkie, who had taken her first hit after years of being clean and even though it had nauseated her, she was already desperate for more.

A lamp on Topher's desk was on but the office seemed to be empty and Claire was about to turn around and head for the server room, but then she noticed the faint sound of slow, regular breathing coming from beyond the far end of the settee. She advanced silently into the room and peered into the shadows. Sitting on the floor, wedged into the small space between the couch and the side table with the gumball machine on it, Topher was fast asleep surrounded by piles of ringbinders, one of which lay open across his knees. Claire knelt down in front of him and he stirred immediately, blinking a few times and then starting back against the wall. She was expecting a tirade of recriminations for sneaking up on him, but none came; he didn't speak at all and that was strange and discomfiting. For a long moment they just stared at one another and Claire had time to take in the changes in his appearance: he'd lost weight and muscle definition, giving him a lanky, teenagerish look, though he must be past thirty now; his hair was longer than she'd ever seen it, grazing his shoulders and falling in his eyes at the front and his jaw was covered with days' worth of stubble. These signs of neglect made her feel almost guilty for leaving, though it was ridiculous that she should feel she was in any way responsible for him.

Finally, he spoke, his voice soft and slightly hoarse: "You came back."

Claire couldn't tell if he meant it as a reproach, an expression of approval or just an observation so she kept her reply equally ambiguous: "You're still here."

Topher nodded, looking around vaguely, as if noticing his whereabouts for the first time. "Yeah, I'm here, but not still. I went away for a couple of months. DeWitt made me; I didn't want to but she told me she was firing me for my own good, or whatever. Said she'd call my mom and have her come pick me up if I didn't leave, which, by the way, has definitely made it into my list of her top five most terrifying threats ever." He smiled then, a familiar toothy grin, but his eyes were anxious, searching Claire's face, as if to check he was meeting her expectations.

"So what happened?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I didn't go to my parents' place, obviously - we've never gotten along - so I went and hung out in that apartment I bought over in Pasadena, caught up on some video games. It was pretty great at first, but then it got kinda... quiet. What's the point of being a genius if there's no one around to impress, right?" The anxious smile again. To humor him, Claire raised her eyes in the exasperated way, which, when they worked together, used to routinely punctuate their conversations. Encouraged, Topher continued. "So I came back and DeWitt didn't try and kick me out again. Guess she figured out they need me here, 'specially now the heads we chopped off the Rossum Hydra are growing back scarier." He waggled his fingers menacingly, then paused for a moment, thoughtful. "You shouldn't have though."

"Shouldn't have what?"

"Come back. You got away from here. Properly." His hand made a smoothing motion in front of her face, which Claire guessed must be meant to indicate her lack of scars. "Not being able to leave was a core feature of your imprint and you still managed it better than most of us here. Way better than me." He was gazing at her with open admiration, and Claire wondered whether he was impressed with her, or with the adaptability of the imprint he designed. Most likely the two were inextricably bound together in his mind and always would be.

"No I didn't," she told him angrily. "I tried harder than you, that's all, but I still failed. Why else would I have come back? There's nothing out there for me – nothing real - only a make-believe life that _you_ invented!" She crawled toward him, straddling his outstretched legs, and stabbed a finger into his chest. "I tried to claim it back, my supposed life, pathetic and lonely though it was. I went and met all the people I was made from and all the ones I was supposed to have known – dozens of them - and not one of them meant anything to me. All I ever learnt were things about _you_; how _you _wanted me to be and the ways _you_ tried to keep me under control. You can try and tell me it wasn't your fault; that it was all just orders from DeWitt, but there are parts of my imprint that I _know_ came direct from Topher Brink."

Claire kept expecting him to interrupt her outburst with a barrage of self-justification or, at least, to try and put some physical distance between them, as she was now sitting astride his thighs, her face inches from his. But he didn't; he didn't struggle or argue with anything she was saying; he just sat there silently with his head bowed like a scolded child.

His contrition knocked some of the anger out of Claire and she took a deep breath, suddenly aware of how refreshing it felt to be able to say all these things that had been fermenting in her mind for so long out loud. "You really went to a lot of trouble to keep me away from you, didn't you?" she continued. "The aversion to your smell I'd already noticed, but giving me those horrible memories of your creepy alter-ego Sean, now that was an impressive piece of programming. Very subtle."

"Thanks, but it looks like it didn't work so well, huh?" Topher spoke at last, lifting his head, so that his nose almost touched Claire's, and shooting her a timid smile.

"I guess not," she agreed, leaning back to look him in the eye, "but I still wonder why you tried so hard. I wonder sometimes if it had something to do with whoever owned this body before, because I think you knew her and that maybe you put some pieces of her in me. Just little, unimportant things that served no practical purpose and that no one else would ever notice. I think you put them in just for yourself; to remind you of her. Am I right?"

Topher nodded guiltily. He opened his mouth to say something, but Claire covered it with her hand. "No, that's enough! I don't want to know anything more about her. I never have and I never will!" she instructed him severely. "Have you got that?"

He nodded again with a docility that Claire found pleasing. After Boyd's ruthless exploitation of her, followed by three and a half years spent steadily losing her grip on everything she thought she knew about herself, it was good to be reminded that in this particular relationship, if nowhere else in her life, she had always been the one in control. She acted and Topher reacted.

"I still don't understand you though," she told him more gently. "You programmed me with characteristics that belonged to this real girl, who you obviously cared about in some way, yet when you were given the choice, you put me back in this body instead of her."

Topher didn't reply immediately but Claire's words had obviously affected him. He squeezed his hands together tightly in front of his face and closed his eyes, then he began to mumble, more to himself than to her: "There was no right choice; I never get to make any right choices. Everything I do always hurts somebody. And when I try to fix things, I always wind up making them worse. I tried to fix you but now you're broken worse than before and I don't…"

"Shh, shh, Topher, calm down. Look at me," Claire cut him off, pulling his knotted hands apart and holding them tightly in hers. His eyes, which he reopened obediently, were damp and bleary. "You did the right thing when you put me back in this body, OK? I wanted to live and you knew that. By giving me what I wanted, you showed me that I'd become a real person to you and I appreciate that now more than ever. If even you, my creator, could come to believe I was real, then some part of me must have been, even if it was only for the few months I lived in the Dollhouse and made your life a misery."

Topher smiled a watery smile. "You can try and make it a misery again if it'll help. I preferred your misery to the kind we have now. I kind of missed it." He shifted slightly beneath her, tipping her weight from one of his legs to the other. Claire's mind flashed back to the last time she had pinned him down like this and she wondered if that was what he was thinking of too. He certainly hadn't enjoyed the experience at the time and neither had she. For Claire it had been a no-win situation: either Topher welcomed the seduction, which would have confirmed her theory that he had always intended for her to fall in love with him, or – as actually happened – he rejected her, thereby strengthening her suspicion that he saw her – for all his protestations to the contrary - as nothing more than a temporary, artificial interloper in the body of someone much more important.

As Claire remembered how utterly forlorn and worthless she had felt at that moment when he pushed her away from him on his sad little bed in the server room, a sudden, overwhelming desire to repeat the test surged through her. To prove things had changed. To be absolutely sure that she was enough of a person to him to be allowed to make her own choices and do as she wished with the body he had given her.

That was how she'd justify her actions to herself afterwards; though she knew there were probably a thousand other more or less noble motivations swilling around her subconscious, from a petty eagerness to check she had truly overtaken her unknown predecessor in Topher's loyalties, to a plain and simple need for comfort: one very broken person reaching out to another because, even though they couldn't fix each other, at least they understood the damage better than anyone else.

She darted her head forward and kissed him lightly but squarely on the mouth. Topher made a surprised little sound in his throat; what would have been a 'huh?' if his lips had been free to articulate it. But he didn't try and escape, even when she pulled back momentarily to give him the chance. Reassured, Claire resumed the kiss more forcefully, dropping Topher's hands to clutch the sides of his thin face. He closed his eyes and let her, folding his arms around her shoulders and pulling her toward him in a tight, needy hug. Claire wondered how long it had been since someone hugged him last.

It was only later, after they had slid down to the floor, crushing ringbinders uncomfortably beneath them, and Claire had begun to unbutton Topher's shirt, that the reaction she was dreading set in. His body tensed up suddenly and he caught hold of her wrists, stilling them. She froze too, prepared herself to be flung aside, wondered how she should react: not with a slap this time; Topher didn't deserve that. Better she should slap herself soundly for being stupid and conceited enough to think that he would _ever_ want this - want her - after everything that had happened between them. Probably, he didn't even believe that she really wanted him either and assumed that this was all just another of her mind games.

While she was thinking all of these things, Topher had made no move to shove her off him; instead he was tugging at her wrists, urging her to lean down toward his face, as if he wanted to tell her a secret. When she complied, he whispered, "I can't do this here."

Claire drew back, confused. "What do you mean?"

He didn't reply, but stretched out an arm toward one of the files scattered around them, pointing at the label neatly printed on its spine. 'Cortical Imprinting Lecture Notes - Bennett Halverson – 08/04/2009.'

"Oh," exclaimed Claire, sitting up and covering her mouth with her hand. Of course, this was the room where it had happened: where the sleeper imprint of Clyde 2.0 which had seized control of her body had shot Bennett in the head, right in front of Topher's eyes. Naturally, Claire had no memory of the shooting itself, but the security footage she watched later had been enough to emblazon the horrific scene vividly and indelibly into her brain.

Slowly, Claire lifted herself off Topher's lap, stood up and smoothed her blouse; she couldn't bring herself to speak or even to look at him. Instead, she fixed her gaze on the patch of carpet by his desk where a few rust-colored stains were still faintly visible.

"Please don't leave."

She turned around, surprised. In a matter of seconds, Topher had scrambled to his feet and pinned her against the tall computer cart in the corner in a frantic, clumsy, tooth-clashing kiss. Then, equally rapidly, he broke it off. "Let's go somewhere else," he panted, a note of pleading in his voice.

The server room, backdrop to another angst-laden episode in their relationship, was out of the question, of course. Truth be told, Claire struggled to think of any area of the Dollhouse proper which hadn't been the setting of some kind of confrontation between the two of them, of varying degrees of causticity. So, in the end, she led him down to her own little apartment – if you could even call it that: just a bedroom, bathroom and tiny living room – at the end of the narrow corridor directly behind her office.

It was cold, dark and slightly musty in the rooms she had once called home - apparently no one had so much as entered since she left – and Claire probably wouldn't have wanted to linger there if she'd been alone (she might even have been tempted to sleep huddled with the others out on the main floor). But Topher was warm and very close, pushing her up against the door as soon as she closed it behind them. And she reveled in the way his stubble rasped painfully against her skin; and the sound of his breathing, quick and heavy in her ear; and even his earthy smell, the smell of _him_, unwashed for several days, rather than of his many grooming products (the artificial odors of which she was sure she'd still have found distasteful even if she hadn't been programmed to). Because these sensations were real – just as Topher himself was real - and feeling them reassured Claire that she was too. She'd almost forgotten what it was like to _feel_, she realized, as Topher's nervous fingers, slightly roughened by the dozens of tiny soldering burns she'd so often treated, slid hesitantly under her blouse and brushed delicately across the soft flesh of her belly. She'd spent so long thinking that she'd nearly managed to think herself right out of existence. Now, she would have liked nothing more than to stop thinking altogether; turn off her brain and turn on her senses. She knew it was a hopeless wish: she was built to overanalyze (and damn Topher for that too), but she owed it to herself at least to try.

So she pushed him down hard onto her neatly-made bed and flung herself unceremoniously on top of him, dragging his half-unbuttoned shirt and t-shirt over his head as she did so. Doubtful that enough of Topher's once-staggering self-confidence remained for him to move things forward as quickly as she wanted, Claire sat up on his lap – pressing her weight down onto his erection until he gasped – and pulled off her own blouse and bra. Then, she stretched out along the length of his body, flattening herself fast against him so that his too-prominent ribs grated against her own, and began an assault on his neck, worrying it with open-mouthed kisses that were closer to bites.

The sheer violence of her need came as a shock to Claire, as did the violent way it expressed itself. She hadn't known there was this much passion left inside her and she couldn't even pinpoint its exact cause. Residual resentment toward Topher himself? Pent-up, displaced rage against Boyd? Or just years' worth of emotional (not to mention sexual) deprivation and loneliness? Which of these things was it that drove her to scrape her teeth so hard along Topher's throat and dig her nails deep enough into his biceps to leave crescent-shaped marks?

For a minute or more, Topher just lay there beneath her, taking it, palms flat against the bed. His chest was heaving as if in panic and his limbs quivering imperceptibly and Claire wondered if, once again, the part of him that wanted this was no more than the minority vote. Or perhaps he saw it as some kind of penance; a fitting punishment for his sins against her, or her body's rightful owner, or maybe both of them and others too. She threw a quick glance at his face – flushed, with eyes shut tight and lips parted – but it was impossible to tell what was going through his mind or even whether pleasure or pain was the dominant sensation he was experiencing.

In the past, getting a strong reaction out of him of _any_ kind – the more anguished the better - had always been enough to give Claire a kick. Tonight, though, things were different: she wanted more from him than stoic resignation or knee-jerk physical responses. She had to have proof that whatever this _thing_ between them was, it went in both directions; that he needed her as much as she needed him. Otherwise how was it really any different from any of those fake, one-sided relationships that he had programmed into her?

She wriggled further up Topher's body so that their faces were level and tugged at his hair. "Why didn't you want me to go?" she whispered urgently. It didn't matter whether he took this as a reference to his plea of twenty minutes earlier or to the resistance he had shown to her leaving the Dollhouse in the first place after he re-imprinted her; the answer to either question would do.

He opened his eyes and looked directly into hers for a few moments, his hands rising uncertainly from the quilt and coming to rest on her back, where they traced light, ticklish patterns.

"Because I'm a bad person," he said at last.

Suddenly, his grip tightened and he rolled her over so that their positions were reversed and he was braced above her on his forearms. Claire looked up at him; her heart beating a little faster. Should she be expecting some kind of retaliation? Heaven knew, it was long overdue.

But when Topher moved again it was only to press a string of gentle kisses along her collarbone.

"It was you who made me realize that," he mumbled against her skin.


	3. Chapter 3

The wallpanel that simulated natural light was a dirty shade of grayish pink when Claire awoke. It was dawn. She'd only slept for three or four restless hours - tossing and turning and plagued by bad dreams - and she felt more exhausted than she had the night before.

She knew where she was instantly – something in the artificial quality of the air perhaps – but it took a moment, and a glimpse of the scattered clothing on the floor, before she remembered who should be beside her. He wasn't, though, and, judging by the cold, undented pillows on the other side of the bed, hadn't been for some time.

Confused and a little hurt in spite of herself (though also relieved to have avoided the inevitable awkwardness of waking up together), Claire got out of bed and put on a robe. Light and the soft chatter of the television were emanating from under the door of the living room. She opened it: Topher was sitting on the floor in front of the TV in his boxer shorts. He was curled into a ball, hugging his knees to his chest and staring intently at the screen with an expression of profound distress on his face. So engrossed was he that he hardly seemed to notice when Claire came in and sat down on the couch behind him.

She didn't pay much attention to the television at first; she was distracted by the sight of the damage she had inflicted on Topher's thin, pale body: long, puffy, pink scratches stretching across his back and down his arms; purplish bite marks discernible here and there beneath the stubble on his face and neck; she even thought she could make out a clutch of five, faint, finger-shaped bruises encircling his left shoulder.

Horrified, Claire renewed the mental vow she had made before she fell asleep that the events of last night must never, _ever_ be repeated. She started to get up, intending to rummage around in the closet for some antiseptic lotion, but Topher suddenly shot out an arm and pulled her back down.

"Look!" he exclaimed, shaking a forefinger violently at the TV. It was tuned to CNN and the words 'Shanghai Riots: Special Report' were stamped at the corner of the screen. The presenter who was talking to camera was standing on top of a building, a helicopter behind him.

"…CNN staff are, like all foreign journalists, being advised to evacuate the city as quickly as possible. However, as the violence seems to be currently extremely localized, we will continue to cover the situation from temporary offices in neighboring Jiaxing. This is Tom Manckiewicz for CNN, Shanghai."

"Thanks, Tom," said an anchorman, as the program cut back to the studio. "And we'll be bringing you more updates direct from China as soon as we have them. In the meantime, here are some images from a local broadcaster."

Another cut to shaky, blurry footage of city streets filled with fighting, screaming, stampeding crowds. People of all types and ages, from children to businessmen in suits, old ladies and police were caught up in the throng and it was impossible to tell who was on which side, or even if there were sides at all, or just a bloody, chaotic free-for-all.

Scrolling text across the bottom of the screen announced that the origins or causes of the rioting were, as yet, unknown, though political analysts were suggesting racial motivation arising from the recent influx of migrant workers from the Northern provinces.

Topher made an impatient, huffing noise and switched off the set. Then he swiveled around to look up at Claire. "That's it. They've done it. They've finally got it working how they want it," he said in a panicky half-whisper, grabbing the cord of her robe and winding it distractedly around his fingers. "It took them a while – longer than I thought it would - but then I guess they have lost their two smartest scientists -"

"For God's sake, Topher, what are you talking about?" snapped Claire, more harshly than she intended; for some reason, perhaps simply exhaustion, the news report had really shaken her, even though she'd only heard a fragment of the story. "I know it's Rossum, isn't it? But what have they got working? What does all this mean?" She gestured at the now-blank television screen.

Topher stared up at her, chewing his lip, restless fingers still fiddling with her belt; apparently at least one of her questions did not have an obvious answer.

"I can't be sure. There _is_ no way to be sure what it means or even if Rossum's behind it," he said finally, frowning. The admission clearly pained him; if there was one thing Topher had always hated, it was uncertainty. "The only thing that is sure is that it wouldn't be happening without their – our – _my _tech. Did I ever tell you that I invented a device capable of wiping and imprinting people remotely?" he asked, but continued without waiting for a reply. "I used to think it was impossible and a crazy bad idea even to try. Then a crazy bad person did try it and – what do you know – it worked: Alpha wiped Echo through her cellphone. And that totally bothered me: that Alpha could figure out a way to do something I couldn't, especially after DeWitt forced me to give it a shot and I epically failed; wound up turning Echo into a serial killer and Victor into a disco-dancing co-ed.

"So I carried on working on the tech in my spare time; made a dumb little _Star Trek_-style ray gun I called a disruptor for putting the Actives to sleep; told myself that was all I _wanted_ to make 'cause anything more sophisticated would probably just get me in trouble again.

"But then Harding – this creepy, high up Rossum guy - comes along and takes the House out of DeWitt's control; starts ratcheting up the R and D; throws me a wad of cash, a team of researchers and more flattery than even I felt comfortable with, and he puts me to work on finding a way to turn my disruptor into a remote wiping device.

"I was suspicious right away; orders from Harding never lead to anything good (we all figured that out round about the time he tried to make us hand Sierra over to a rapist). I guessed the work he was making me do on the disruptor was just a little piece of a much bigger, scarier whole and I guess really I knew all along what that whole was going to be; it was logical: it's the ultimate refinement, the natural zenith of the Dollhouse tech…"

Topher paused for the first time in several minutes, swallowed, blinked; steeling himself. Claire touched her fingertips lightly to the back of his hand and waited patiently for the confession to continue.

"A machine that could wipe and imprint _anyone instantly_," Topher finished, pronouncing each word slowly and emphatically. "No need for Active architecture, no need for tissue mapping or personality wedges or a fancy dentist's chair: you just point your little gun at Joe Schmoe on the street and _zap, _he's a ninja, or a swordfighter, or a disco-dancing co-ed.

"I knew that was what they'd try and invent eventually but I wasn't _sure _it could really be done. I thought it could but I had to try to be sure so I... I designed the tech myself. Turned out to be freakily easy; between us, me and Bennett had already done about eighty percent of the groundwork.

"But it was just an idea, just plans on a piece of paper; of course I didn't mean for anyone to actually build the frakking thing! It was DeWitt's fault Rossum got hold of my blueprints; she betrayed my trust and handed them over to Harding just so he'd give her back some pathetic semblance of control over her House. Then she tried to lay the blame on me; told me I shouldn't have come up with the design in the first place; that I only did it out of selfish fascination or whatever, and OK, maybe that was a little bit true but it wasn't the only reason, not the main one. I was trying to stay ahead of Rossum's game, figure out a way to _stop_ them from ever knowing what I knew..."

Topher was talking faster and faster, his voice steadily rising in pitch, eyes pleading. Claire knew he was expecting, or hoping at least, that she would cut him off, offer words of reassurance or comfort, or at least give some sign that she accepted his desperate self-justification.

But she couldn't do it; couldn't think of anything to say at all that wouldn't be a painfully-obvious lie. Topher had mentioned to her before she left the Dollhouse that Rossum were now in possession of portable, universal wiping technology. It wasn't something Claire was ever likely to forget since the reason the subject came up was that Topher had admitted he had used the equipment himself on Boyd during the assault on Rossum's Tucson headquarters, thereby allowing Echo to send him obediently to his death.

Claire hadn't known that the same device could also be used for imprinting or that it had been Topher who designed it, but frankly, it wasn't really much of a shock: as Topher himself used to tell anyone who would listen _ad nauseam_, he had always been Rossum's best, brightest and most prolific innovator. He couldn't help it; it was compulsive: the drive to constantly refine, improve and develop the Dollhouse technology, pushing neuroscience to its limits. And as, for many years, he had succeeded in ignoring the ethical implications of everything he was doing, it made perfect sense that he would have eventually invented something as potentially devastating as an instrument capable of instantly reprogramming any brain, whether ordered to do so by ill-intentioned Rossum executives or not.

She was ready to believe that he never actually meant for the device to be built, but anyone with a normal sense of morality would have thought long and hard before they even began work on the theory. Not to say that no one else would have done it, if they had the capability - far from it - but only the truly wicked – the Hardings and Boyds of this world - would have gone ahead and designed such a device _after _due consideration of the possible consequences. Topher's tragedy was that he was not wicked; he had just somehow, inexplicably, failed to think properly about the consequences of _anything_ he had done until it was much too late. Now that he had started thinking (and Claire refused to take sole responsibility for that; surely it would have been inevitable, eventually), he couldn't stop. The worst possible consequences of his actions were finally starting to arrive and it was torturing him. But what could Claire, or anyone else, do to help? Topher was a genius; if he thought the violence in China (and presumably the smaller-scale outbreaks of similar random brutality elsewhere) could be traced back to a machine of his own conception then she didn't doubt that it could; she'd suspected as much all along anyway. For her to try and argue the contrary would be both disingenuous and pointless.

Topher was still muttering away, to himself now, speculating about how Rossum - or possibly some other sinister organization if his plans had been leaked – might have managed to integrate the functionality of his universal imprinting gun into a telephone network-based transmission system similar to the one Alpha had used on Echo. Claire could see that even now, after everything, he couldn't bear not to fully understand every new advancement in the disastrous technology he thought of as his own.

Finally, he seemed to remember he had an audience and rose up on his knees to look her in the face. "Shanghai was just the test, anyway," he declared. "Test for what, you may ask, but who can tell? Nothing good, that's for sure. But don't worry, Doc, I'm sure we'll all be safe as houses down here in our cozy, luxury bunker. That would be an awesome piece of irony, wouldn't it? If _we_ were the only survivors in the whole world." He started to laugh then: a mad and mirthless chuckle; his bloodshot eyes were wide and fearful and the hand beneath Claire's trembled.

"Stop it, Topher! You're worn out and hysterical," she told him sternly, deciding to let the sensible, down-to-earth doctor she was programmed to be take control of the situation. "Did you sleep at all last night?"

Topher shook his head. "Not so much. I'm blaming the bed. Not that I'm trying to insult the bed or its owner: it was totally soft and warm and snugglesome; way too nice for me. I just don't do so great with beds in general these days."

Claire sighed. "Well, you need to get some rest, so I'm going to take you back to your own bed, OK? I'm sure you'll be able to sleep better there. But first we need to fix you up a bit, starting with a shower."

She got up purposefully and bustled about fetching towels and soap. Topher, quiet at last, put up no resistance to the shower, or the antiseptic Claire dabbed on his scratches afterwards, or the clean pair of pajamas she fetched from her office, or any of the rest of her fussing. Perhaps he sensed it was what her conscience demanded.

* * *

To Claire's relief, the other occupants of the House were still asleep when they set back out across the atrium. She headed automatically for the stairs leading up to the server room but Topher took her hand and pulled her into one of the Actives' old bed chambers. "DeWitt wanted everyone to stick together even at night," he explained when she looked at him curiously, "but I don't like being too close to the others. I don't think they trust me and so I don't trust them. I feel safer in here." He released her hand abruptly and took a running leap into one of the sleep pods, which was surrounded with books, notepads and toys. Evidently, he'd been settled there for a while.

"You can come sleep in here with me as well if you like. There's plenty of room for two if you don't mind getting friendly," Topher called, poking his head over the rim of the pod and waggling his eyebrows, but his voice was a little too beseeching to make the comedy leer he was aiming for a total success.

Claire backed away in horror, revulsion building in her stomach and rising upward into her throat so it seemed to choke her. She had known Topher was damaged for a long time: as soon as he reimprinted her, she could tell that a small but essential part of him – his flippancy, or rather the ability to be _sincerely_ flippant - had been lost; died along with Bennett perhaps. Then, while Claire was away, his condition had deteriorated: that much was obvious on first glance, from his haunted eyes and air of neglect, even before he opened his mouth and the disjointed, guilt-ridden babbling began to spill uncontrollably out.

But it was only now that she suddenly understood the full extent of his mental disintegration; how very much more unstable he was than she. Or maybe the knowledge had been there all along, but she had been too bent on using him for her own egocentric project of self-affirmation to allow it to surface. Even now – to her shame – the dominant emotion it filled her with was fear, fear that he would drag her down with him to a level where being a vacant, responsibility-free Doll was a condition to be subconsciously craved.

"I'm so sorry, Topher," was all she could stammer before she turned her back on him and hurried away.


	4. Chapter 4

Gradually, so slowly she hardly noticed it happening, Claire began to forget. Minute pieces of her memory flaking away like dead skin, day by day. The rarely-used knowledge was the first to go: names and faces from her childhood, the plots of books and movies she liked, song lyrics and recipes. Living underground, in a permanent state of emergency, with a steady stream of wounded newcomers to tend, such recollections were more than useless anyway - a distraction – and Claire did not mourn their loss.

Later, though, more important things started to slip away. When Moira, the sister of the man who had once been Bravo, had an epileptic fit, Claire couldn't remember a single one of the twenty approved medications for the condition, even though she'd spent her two-year residency on a neurology ward. It completely escaped her mind that the erstwhile Victor and Sierra's small son, T, was overdue on a long list of routine shots, until his concerned mother asked her about it. And when the ex-Charlie took a nasty blow to the chest from a Butcher during a recon mission, she found that the corner of her orderly mind where the symptoms of internal bleeding had once been listed was inexplicably empty and she had to go running to her old Med School-era Merck Manual to look them up.

Eventually, of course, the others started to notice her forgetfulness. There was another doctor in the group now, Dr Linda Goldsworthy, a former client and personal friend of DeWitt's, so Claire's diminishing expertise was not as much of a disaster as it could have been. But those who knew her well were concerned for her own sake; she could see it in their faces when she groped around for the name of a bone or lost her thread in the middle of a diagnosis.

Typically, DeWitt was the first to broach the issue head-on.

"Your imprint's fading," she announced without preamble, marching into Claire's office and sliding the door shut. "Topher was having a relatively lucid day yesterday so I took the opportunity to ask his opinion about your memory loss. Probably not a good idea in hindsight as it set him off on a monologue about his supposed mistreatment of you." She frowned slightly, as though this was somehow Claire's fault.

"But in any case, he reminded me that long-term imprints were always difficult to achieve and fundamentally imperfect. When the House was operational, we used to bring in Actives on lengthy engagements, yourself included, for regular diagnostics and whole or partial refresher imprints. You have been unchecked and un-refreshed for more than five years now, so it's little wonder that certain parts of your imprint are beginning to fray. I suppose we shall have to persuade poor Topher to go upstairs and make the necessary repairs, though I must admit it worries me that he may no longer be capable of it."

"There's no need. I don't want to be refreshed," said Claire evenly.

"Indeed?" DeWitt raised her eyebrows and lent back against Claire's desk with her arms folded imperiously, awaiting an explanation for this outrageous statement.

"Look, Adelle -" Claire complied out of politeness, though it wasn't really any of DeWitt's business, "hardly anything I know or remember is real. That is a fact that I've become more acutely aware of every day since I first discovered what I really was. Now, all the artificial pieces of me are slowly starting to slip away and it seems… natural somehow; as though they're drifting apart because they were never meant to be together in the first place." She smiled crookedly, inwardly mocking herself for this uncharacteristic foray into vague and self-indulgent simile. DeWitt was staring at her with a half-pitying, half-skeptical look on her face; a reasonable enough reaction to someone who was quite literally losing their mind and didn't want to stop. Claire tried again; this time appealing to the pragmatism she and her former employer had always shared.

"Can't you see how strange it would be, perverse even, to refresh a swathe of memories that I know aren't mine? Most of them are pointless anyway; the usual random filler that Topher used to cram into every imprint to make it believable. The only part that really matters now is my medical training, and so far at least I've been able to remind myself of the things I've forgotten through books or by asking Linda."

"If you believe that your professional competence is the only quality we value in you, Doctor, you are very much mistaken," replied DeWitt, her assertive voice tempered with a gentleness that she usually reserved for her interactions with Topher, "but evidently the fate of your brain is entirely your own choice. No one forces anyone to do anything in this House any more. We are among the few fortunate people left in the world with the freedom to be who we wish to be and I consider it my mission to preserve that privilege for as long as possible."

* * *

It wasn't long afterwards that Echo returned to the Dollhouse. Caroline was her dominant personality now, and that was what most people called her; though to Claire, who did not share her companions' investment in 'authentic' identity, she would always be Echo.

Apparently the lengthy mission she had alluded to in her email had been a success: after a long and perilous journey, she and Paul had reached a compound established by a now-benign Alpha high up in the Arizona Mountains, whose inhabitants were protected from blanket imprinting signals by a vaccine stolen from the nearby Rossum headquarters.

Within a week, the Dollhouse was gearing itself up for mass migration to the place which someone, possibly Alpha himself, had tritely christened Safe Haven. Echo wanted to assemble as many non-imprinted people, or 'Actuals,' there as possible, so Claire (computer skills, for the time being, still intact) offered to help her make a backup copy of herself to leave behind at the Dollhouse and act as a guide for any late returnees or other wanderers who might wish to follow them.

"Goddamn, I'd forgotten how much that hurt," said Echo, sitting up in the chair and massaging her temples. Claire ejected the newly-recorded wedge and handed it to her. "Thanks, Doc. I'll put it downstairs with the others. Now all I have to do is figure out a foolproof way to get any Actuals who show up here to use it. The bitch is that really we're looking at two separate problems. First, they have to find the wedge, and I don't know how we can make sure it's only nice, friendly, non-Rossum types who do. Then, they've gotta have a way of accessing it; in other words, a handy Dumbshow or some other buddy with Active Architecture who happens to be tagging along with them and doesn't mind lending their brain to yours truly for a couple of weeks."

"I know, but don't worry: there's a simple means of solving both problems at the same time," Claire said, turning away from Echo and preparing herself for the argument she knew was about to ensue.

"No way! Please don't tell me you've come up with a solution in three days to what the thirty-nine people in my head have been drawing a blank on for over a month. That's just embarrassing. But good for you, Doc. Let's hear it."

"I'll do it. I'll stay behind at the Dollhouse and show people where the wedge is hidden and how the chair works and, if necessary, they can imprint your personality into my body."

Silence. Then a short sharp laugh. "You are fucking kidding me, right?" Echo jumped out of the chair and snatched Claire's arm, jerking her round to face her. "You can't do that."

"Why not? You said yourself that Safe Haven is for Actuals; I'm not an Actual and I have no desire to be one."

"I did not say that! I'm not an Actual myself, for god's sake; neither is Alpha who founded the damn place. Safe Haven is for anyone with a mind they want to hang on to."

"Well, you know, I haven't been doing such a great job of hanging onto my mind myself lately," Claire replied reflectively, not rising to Echo's confrontational tone, although usually she had a true horror of being told what she should or shouldn't do with her life. "Strangely, though, there are some things that seem to be sticking around better than the rest, whether I want them to or not, and the most powerful of all is the idea that I should stay here and look after the Dollhouse and whoever's in it no matter what. I know it doesn't make any logical sense given everything that's happened in the last few years, but it's just the way I feel. Maybe it's something to do with my programming. Topher once told me that the mission parameter was always the strongest part of an imprint."

She glanced at Echo, checking if she was going to try and interrupt, but she had sat back down quietly with a concerned expression, ready to listen. No doubt one of her personalities was a counselor or social worker of some kind.

"It's more than just programming though. My more recent memories haven't faded yet either; the ones that were actually mine, rather than part of my imprint, and most of them just give me all the more reason to want to stay."

"Like what kind of thing?" Echo asked.

"Well, like the realization I came to during my travels, for a start: that nothing in my imprint really means anything to me; none of it's real. The only part of me that is is what happened to me here, in this House. I don't love the place – far from it – but it defines me; I don't belong anywhere else. And then… I guess there's something else too; something even stupider -" Claire hesitated, embarrassed.

"Nothing you've said so far sounds in any way stupid to me. Go ahead."

"Before Boyd left the Dollhouse, supposedly to go on the run from Rossum, he told me to wait for him, that he'd come back to me. I don't know whether he somehow programmed that idea into me at the same time he installed the sleeper imprint, or whether it just stuck with me naturally because of how I felt about him at the time. I know it's insane and ridiculous: he's been dead for years and if any of his henchmen had wanted to bring him back in a new body they'd have done it long ago, and we'd know about it because he'd have come back here to try and kidnap you again and probably had the rest of us killed along the way. He was a dangerous, psychotic megalomaniac; the rational part of me knows that and curses his memory every day, and yet… I still can't get over the feeling I should be waiting for him and I don't think I ever will," Claire finished, with a matter-of-fact shrug, though she could feel hot tears trickling down her cheeks.

"Different pieces of your brain pulling in opposite directions; I'm hearing that loud and clear," said Echo, rising again and putting a hand on Claire's shoulder. "Listen, Doc, I'm not gonna try and talk you out of staying, if that's really what the biggest part of you wants, but I've just gotta say it once: I think it's a mistake; I think you'll wind up losing your mind completely."

Claire waited until Echo had given her shoulder a squeeze and disappeared down the stairs before she replied, "That wouldn't be so bad."


	5. Epilogue

If Adelle was completely honest with herself (and she usually was), she was really quite relieved when Dr Saunders announced her intention not to accompany the rest of the group to Safe Haven. On a practical level, it was reassuring to have someone stay behind and act as custodian of the Dollhouse; Adelle did not like the idea of the place she would never quite stop thinking of as 'hers' falling into the wrong hands.

But beyond that, she had to admit that she found something vaguely unnerving in the figure of the doctor, pale and ghost-like in her eternal white lab-coat. Guilt was not an emotion that Adelle had often experienced during her life, and in others she viewed it as a sign of weakness, yet her decision to allow Claire Saunders to continue indefinitely inhabiting the body of a woman who had placed herself in Adelle's care was not one of which she was particularly proud. Not that the alternative – effectively murdering Claire – seemed preferable; hence the unnerving quality: Adelle was used to being sure of her decisions.

In this instance, she was well aware that her judgment had been clouded by her irremediable (and lately less carefully-concealed) soft spot for Topher. It was obvious that some kind of mysterious but powerful bond existed between the programmer and the doctor, strong enough to make him risk his life to drag her unconscious body from the burning Rossum building, and then to restore the Saunders imprint to that body, rather than that of its original owner as he had been directed. But as to the exact nature of the bond, Adelle could only to speculate.

For the first few months after Topher had programmed Whiskey with the Claire Saunders persona, their relationship had seemed limited to the mutual irritation thinly veiled by professional tolerance that one would expect their drastically dissimilar personalities to produce. Then, one day, without any impetus or warning – or at least any that Adelle had been aware of - Claire suddenly left the Dollhouse: broke the layers and layers of intricate programming that Topher had designed to keep her there; stole a company car and disappeared without a trace.

Mystified, Adelle had turned to Boyd Langton, then her trusted Head of Security, for his opinion about the cause of the doctor's unwarranted behavior. With his usual diplomacy, Boyd had refused to apportion blame as such, but he did remark that Claire had recently been acting in an overtly hostile – even malicious - manner toward Topher, and raised the possibility that this and her abrupt departure from the House might conceivably have a common cause; namely that Claire had somehow discovered her true identity as an Active and was consequently experiencing a severe attack of metaphysical angst, manifesting itself as rage and rebellion against her creator.

In hindsight, Adelle realized that Boyd must have known a lot more about the situation than he let on at the time – most likely he had even encouraged Claire to abscond - but the essence of what he said did nevertheless appear to be true: during the weeks leading up to her disappearance Claire had developed a passionate – some might even say pathological - hatred of Topher. This became clear while she was away, when other staff members consulted her meticulously-maintained files and found that in the later entries, she repeatedly blamed Topher for almost every concern she felt about any of the Actives' wellbeing. Her accusations against him ranged from the more or less reasonable – if he had thought to give Lima ice-skating skills when a client took her on a winter holiday to Germany, she wouldn't have broken her ankle - to those which were downright unfounded, such as her recurrent conjecture that Topher himself was the cause of various Actives' supposed mental distress.

Topher, meanwhile, evidently felt that he had some kind of responsibility or obligation toward Claire; why else would he have been so determined to resurrect her? Perhaps he blamed himself for her unhappiness just as much as she did. He had certainly always seemed to find her presence uncomfortable; and increasingly so as time wore on. There had been just one brief period following Claire's first return to the Dollhouse – calm and smiling on Boyd's arm - when their relationship had suddenly improved to an almost cordial level. And, to Adelle's surprise, the momentary truce had endured even after Claire was reimprinted, despite the fact that Topher had recently watched a person wearing her body put a bullet in the head of his precious Bennett Halverson. Adelle's initial theory was that he must have brought Claire back because he wanted to harangue her about Bennett, but the moment she walked into Topher's lab and saw the two of them together she felt an odd sense of complicity buzzing in the air between them, for which she had yet to find a satisfactory explanation.

But then, since Claire's second return to the House, things had changed again; deteriorated abruptly to the point where she and Topher could hardly bear to be in a room together. He, poor boy, would flinch whenever she so much as passed the sleeping pod where he spent the majority of his time, and while Claire maintained a façade of sensible professionalism, Adelle noticed that she usually found an excuse to make sure it was someone else who administered Topher's medication or talked him down from his hysterical fits.

So although other members of the group had accused Adelle of heartlessness when she agreed to leave Claire behind at the Dollhouse (and it wasn't the first time in her life such a charge had been laid against her), she remained confident that it had been, in the circumstances, the more humane decision. It _was_ what the doctor claimed she wanted, after all, Adelle reflected as she went about her packing, and it certainly seemed it would be beneficial for Topher's mental equilibrium not have her around; that it would also contribute to Adelle's own peace of mind was purely incidental.

* * *

Nobody ever mentioned Claire Saunders at Safe Haven. Her name became a kind of unofficial taboo among the inhabitants, like that of a relative who had died neglected or some other shameful shared secret whose existence no one could quite bring themselves to acknowledge. Eventually, with the day-to-day hardship of fighting off Butchers, raiding the neighboring Rossum stronghold for supplies and cultivating enough food to survive, Claire's name, like those of all the other comrades-in-arms who'd been lost along the way, began to fade from the minds of the little community as well as from their lips. Even Priya, who, back at the Dollhouse, had carefully covered a wall with a collage of old photos headed with the caption 'To Remember,' was too busy worrying about her son's future to give much thought to the past anymore.

Certainly no one spared a thought for Claire amidst the upheaval generated by the arrival of Zone, Mag and Caroline Mark II; Topher's rescue and the subsequent controversial decision to return to the Dollhouse. At least, Adelle assumed that no one had. She for one only realized (with a pang not unlike guilt) how long it had been since the doctor crossed her own mind when Little Caroline took her aside and told her about the pale woman calling herself Whiskey that she and her companions had encountered in the deserted House, and who had insisted on staying there even as the building was overrun by Butchers. Adelle repressed a shudder and made a mental note to search for the body as soon as they arrived and dispose of it in secret.

But when they did finally fight their bloody way back into the underground complex and found it safe, clean and in good working order under Alpha's direction, the situation was so unexpected and so much better than anything Adelle had prepared herself for, that her intention to investigate Whiskey's fate was instantly forgotten.

She hugged Alpha like a long-lost child and as they worked side by side lowering down the boxes of food, ammunition and anti-wiping vaccine that the Safe Haven group had brought with them, they swapped battle stories from the two years they'd been apart, implicitly commiserating with one another over the heavy burden of leadership.

When everything was safely inside and Alpha was handing out cups of coffee and cereal bars to the exhausted newcomers, Adelle glanced around automatically for Topher. He never usually strayed far from her side, especially since his kidnap. But now he was nowhere to be seen and she felt an irrational wave of panic grip her, even though she had supervised his entry into the House herself less than an hour earlier.

She ran anxiously across the atrium, peering into the sleeping chambers, shower area and activity rooms and calling out his name so that the passing Dumbshows stared at her curiously. Finally, when she was on the point of summoning Caroline and the others to mount a full-scale search, Adelle spotted a familiar silhouette through the frosted glass panels that partitioned off what used to be the doctor's office.

With an exhalation of mixed relief and annoyance, she slid back the door. Topher was sitting cross-legged on the examining table sucking a lollipop.

"What on earth are you doing in here? What have I told you about staying with the rest of the group? You had me really worried for a moment."

He didn't respond but he looked so downcast at her harsh tone that Adelle couldn't help but hurry forward and enfold him tenderly in her arms.

"I'm sorry, darling. I didn't mean to shout. Let's go and join everyone else for a nice cup of tea, shall we? Then we can start looking for whatever it is you need to build your machine."

She drew away but Topher caught at her sleeve. "I'm looking for Dr Saunders. That's what I'm doing in here," he said. It was the most coherent statement Adelle had heard him make in a long time. "She should be here but I can't find her. Where is she?"

Adelle sighed. Clearly it had been too much to hope that _he_ would have forgotten Claire the way everyone else had.

"I don't know what happened to her, I'm afraid" she replied honestly. "I suppose we shall have to ask Alpha."

Alpha recounted the story with more sensitivity than Adelle herself would ever have been capable of and it was yet another thing for which she was grateful to him. He heaped praises on Whiskey for the courage and resourcefulness she'd shown in poisoning the invading Butchers with a nerve gas she must have prepared in advance for just such a situation; laying down her own life selflessly for the protection of the Dollhouse and the group of Actuals who'd sought shelter there. As he described how he'd found her body draped peacefully over the railing on the mezzanine walkway, as if watching over the House to the very last, Adelle wiped away a tear. She looked over apprehensively at Topher, but there was no visible sign of emotion on his face beyond a frown of concentration. He listened attentively until Alpha had finished, then he got up and headed purposefully toward his lab muttering under his breath about how much work he had to do.

The following night, as she lay awake in the king-sized bed of a half-demolished luxury hotel, it occurred to Adelle that perhaps the story of Whiskey's self-sacrifice had influenced Topher's decision to make the same gesture. And though she knew she would never have an explanation, she puzzled once again over the strange affinity between them.


End file.
